In the Moon of Marsh Marigolds

                                                Be drunken, always, with wine, poetry, virtue, sadness, as you please. But be drunken.
                                               —Baudelaire

And so it became habit
to gather on the wide porch
at dusk, Skyuka Mountain
before us, a flat field
of marsh marigolds
for the approach, night-lit
by fireflies so luminous
no one knew the stars.

We spoke little
and when we did
it was of arrowheads
deep under the marigolds,
of the red fox running

          or Imhotep

resurrected after 5,000 years
to build a step pyramid

and heal the sick.
We had Renaissance music.
Mostly we listened to silence
on the other side
of the everyday world
or the beagles snuffling mice,
and everything once held as truth

loosed from its moorings

          poof

gently as ripe cottonwood bolls
and so in this shedding
we were set free from burdens.

Around the boundaries
for three weeks in June
we pick ripe blackberries.
More than all, they are everything.